The A-2s always were a bit twitchy

If you want to understand why the right wing hasn’t tossed Brett Kavanaugh overboard and replaced him with a more sober/less rapey nominee, who will make exactly the same rulings on the SCOTUS without first raging at the Senate Judiciary Committee like some out of control substance abuser who hasn’t gotten his fix yet today (btw fantastic acting Brett — it’s almost as if you didn’t even have to act!), you need to consider what Kavanaugh represents to movement conservatism.

Kavanaugh and his running mate Neil Gorsuch represent the first off-the-line models produced by the Federalist Society’s more than 30-year quest to infiltrate America’s elite law schools, and hijack the federal judicial nomination process, by swamping it with cadres of neo-reactionary replicants.  I went to law school at the same time as Kavanaugh as Gorsuch — the late 1980s — so I was there to witness the beginnings of this campaign.   From the start, it was a very conscious, extremely well organized effort.

I saw first-hand how Federalist Society money flowed into elite law schools, creating opportunities for people like Ann Coulter — a classmate of mine — to construct a counter-revolutionary narrative to the then-dominant valorization of the Warren Court at these institutions.

If you were a careerist tool in the 1980s who happened to be inclined by upbringing and education toward  the view the coloreds and the wimmin had been getting a bit too uppity in recent years, the brand-new Federalist Society was as difficult to resist as a bowl of choice Colombian blow at a casual get-together. (I should emphasize here that in the 1980s the drug of choice for white punks on dope was beer, and absolutely not cocaine, and that anybody who even implies that Brett Kavanaugh did rails off a hooker’s tits at a frat party at Yale is slandering a good and decent man, and I will not stand for it).

This nascent movement was turbo-charged by the Bork nomination in the fall of 1987, when young master Kavanaugh was a fresh-faced 1L at Yale Law School, where he matriculated after his hardscrabble beginnings at Yale College, which his grandfather also attended, and where Brett had no connections of any kind, as he testified under oath, and anyone who says otherwise is slandering a good and decent man.

Bork himself was one of the founders of the Federalist Society, and his rejection by the Senate was treated by the Kavanaugh-Coulter-Gorsuch cohort as a sort of left-wing auto-da-fe, that represented everything they were being trained to overthrow. The bottom line is that the Kavanaugh nomination is the culmination of a three-decade long campaign to avenge that supposed ur-atrocity of Political Correctness in Our Universities, and those who were there at the creation will not be denied their revenge.

There’s much more to say about this — someone should do a book on the role of the Federalist Society in contemporary American law and politics — but for the present I’ll limit myself to the observation that the Nexus 6 models currently being cranked out by the corporation are probably going to be harder to spot and air out ten and twenty years down the line, now that Leonard Leo and company have had a whole generation to work out the kinks found in the initial versions.